Comic books

On the inquiry concerning comic books, it is not so much the storage as
the realization that these are printed on acidic newsprint.  When I
moved to Florida in 1981, I gave away my Disney comic book collection to
the Popular Culture Archives at Bowling Green State University.  I know,
it was cruel, now it's *their* problem.  Some years back I asked David
Smith of the Walt Disney Archives about how they were going to preserve
the comic book heritage. Color microfilm is not permanent (color inks
never dry and deteriorate) and I believed black-and-white microfilm to
be a poor substitute for colorful art. I remember him saying that they
had a master catalog of drawings with notations of the color of inks to
use so the comics or art could be reproduced indefinitely.  With this
documentation, preservation of actual comics was not a high priority.

--Dean DeBolt, University of West Florida

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 6:34
                  Distributed: Sunday, January 3, 1993
                        Message Id: cdl-6-34-012
                                  ***